Chris Pratt is Mario, and it's being made by Illumination. That's the studio that has substituted ridiculously oversized advertising budgets for actually having compelling stories. The CG may be nice, but they're simulating disgusting drool and fart jokes with it almost exclusively.
I think Miyamoto got played on this one. Illumination is making exactly the movie their executives WANT to make, and they're lying to Miyamoto so he gives his seal of approval on it. I'm fully expecting this to be as bad as Boss Baby or whatever the heck.
These famous people are NOT voice acting talent (well, except Jack Black, he's got a compandaing case as a solid VA), so it's already clear they're not picking the best names for actors. This... this is going to be bad. The recent Sonic movie wasn't actually terrible. Not good really, but not rage inducing. It was tolerable. Heck, the Pokemon detective movie turned out actually good, not great but enjoyable enough. This however.... I have reservations.
Got my hands on a early draft of the Arizona audit. The final conclusion:
Sorry GOP the votes were correct.
The not so final longer stupid filled GOP undertone:
We can't accept it.
Instead they chose to sow more decent and look for alternatives reasons for the report to be wrong.
Get ready for a audit of the audit.
And get ready for Fox News to read the opposite thing, and more and more stupid ideas to fly out of trumpist idiots.
This narcissist, stupid crap really needs to stop. So absolutely tired of this.
Nintendo just had a Direct earlier today, and they had a bunch of announcements but one, for me, was the best by far.
I have been Kirby fan since the first game in the series, but in all that time, for all of the Kirby games that have been made over the years, one thing has long been missing: a 3d platformer! I have wanted to see what a 3d Kirby game could be since at least the later '90s, but it has never happened...
Until now. Launching in early 2022 Nintendo just announced Kirby and the Forgotten Land for the Switch. It is a 3d platformer. Starring Kirby. Based on the trailer it looks like so much fun, I'm really excited!
The game does seem to sometimes have a pulled-back, kind of overhead camera, but other areas are directly behind the character so the game will have various camera views. This clearly is a real, full-on 3d platformer. It looks like a mid-budget title, but the Kirby games generally are that. The footage looks great, with elements somewhat reminiscent of 3d Mario games, but this is a distinctly Kirby adventure in terms of enemies and music. Kirby 2, 3, and 64's power-combining feature returns as well, which is pretty cool! That always was one of the best things about those games.
The big question isn't answered here, though -- what about the thing that always was going to be the hardest part about making a Kirby game in 3d, his power of flight? I am expecting limited flight, but in this trailer they don't show it eitehr way so we will see. Unlimited flight is the best way for a Kirby game to work but it would be nearly impossible to make a 3d platformer with actual challenge if you could just fly anywhere at any time, heh...
Oh, as for the setting, it's somewhat surprising for a Kirby game -- it's set in an empty, abandoned city on an island that Kirby just washed up on. What happened here... and what is with Nintendo and abandoned-world themes, two games in this Direct have them, both Kirby and Splatoon 3. I think both settings will work well though, they sure are looking interesting in the trailers.
So yeah, this game doesn't look like a 3d Mario game or Breath of the Wild-tier budget game but it looks great and I'm just thrilled that Nintendo announced it!
So, we are out now. Our 20 year long "forever war" is finally over, thanks to Joe Biden doing what nobody had the courage t odo for over a decade now and actually withdraw from a war we could never win.
What do I think? Well, like most people, deeply conflicted, I would say. On the one hand, we did not invade to reform Afghan society and improve status of women and such, we invaded because the Taliban supported Al Quaida and gave them a place to launch the 9/11 attacks from. That could not be ignored. But that doesn't mean we had to do a 20 year long occupation, of course. It just ended up that way because of mission creep and inattention.
On the one hand, civilians died because of the US action in Afghanistan. But on the other hand, the Taliban before were far worse, and many people were glad we got rid of them (for a while). But as the corruption of our puppet government got worse and worse, we lost a lot of the gains we had made, and clearly the US government didn't adjust well to that. And then there's the whole debate over growing opium poppies... and way more. America is very good at blowing things up, but not nearly as good at building lasting systems in the aftermath, clearly. We tried nation building, increased the literacy rate by a decent amount, built schools, and such, but in one of the poorest and least educated nations on the planet, way more was required, if it was even possible at all to modernize that nation... or, more accurately, that grouping of tribes who never really have had a real national government.
So yeah, I was deeply conflicted over Afghanistan for many years. On the one hand, it was obvious we couldn't win, and that our efforts to modernize Afghanistan and make it a less horrible place for women were, while somewhat successful, not nearly enough. But on the other hand, leave and things probably go right back to being incredibly horrible, particularly for women, probably in short order. So yeah, it's tough.
But, the American people finally tired of the war within the last few years, and both candidates in the 2020 election campaigned on a full withdrawl. Trump made a peace deal wit the Taliban that year which set the stage for the collapse to come; Trump's deal is why things have happened as they did. So Biden had a choice -- stick to the withdrawl, or send in many thousands of troops again, to once again fight a hopeless war in the name of "try to keep the status quo going". And yes, that was the choice, it was one or the other.)
And Biden, to his great credit, did the very difficult thing, defied the war-loving media, and actually withdrew. It is extremely impressive he stuck to it, given the pressure than the media and extremely hypocritical Republicans are putting him under for it. Joe Biden has a stubborn streak at times and he's showing it here. To anyone who thought he'd just be a pushover generic moderate, he's proven that very wrong this time! Because even if withdrawl was supported by a large majority of the American people, as the press has shown it is a very difficult thing to accomplish without taking some significant political hits. But Biden is following through with it because he is not willing to send any more Americans to their deaths in the name of the forever war. Again, extremely admirable actions there. It is honestly stunning that it's actually happened! As far as winning or losing the war goes, obviously we surrendered the territory and lost the 'defeat the Taliban' part of our mission. However, the original goal wasn't that, it was 'get Bin Laden and Al Quaida', and that part was accomplished over a decade ago, so it is something of a mixed legacy as far as success goes. Why did we stay so long after that despite having no clear mission apart from the always-struggling nation-building effort? Honestly, my offhand guess is that it's about a lack of political will to retreat, mostly. That finally changed last year and now it has happened. Though who knows if it would have happened with Trump still in office, the optics of this are bad and with an incompetent idiot in charge things would be very very dramatically worse! He might have reneged on the withdrawl or something, you never know. But Biden is sticking to his beliefs, and he is right to do so.
I mean, it'd have been good to be able to stay if the people of that nation wanted us there and the security situation was safe, as it is for, say, our bases in Europe or Japan and South Korea or such, because that is an important part of the world and America has nothing very close to central Asia now, but the people did not want us to stay and it was extremely unsafe, so that is a quite thoroughly moot point. (And yes, I do think American bases are overall better than the alternative, which is Russian or Chinese bases. We have our major faults, but theirs are far worse.)
And Biden is very cautious with drone strikes too, he has only ordered a few, when they are absolutely necessary. We may see drone and special forces warfare in Afghanistan against ISIS or Al Quaida or something in the future, but I'd like to hope we can actually have peace for once, or at least more of it than that poor, war-torn part of the world has had for the last 40-plus years since their wars started in the late '70s! A lot of that will depend on if the Taliban can follow through on their hard-to-believe 'we're more moderate now' talk or if they start behaving as insanely horribly as they did in their initial 1996-201 reign, though...
But yes, ideally it'd have been nice to get even more people out in that airlift, but every additional day came with a high risk of more ISIS attacks. You can't control only the airport indefinitely. I hope we can figure out a way to get more people who want to leave out of that country. But with over a hundred thousand evacuees getting out of that airport, after a rough start I think the evactuation mostly went pretty well. That is the most people ever airlifted out of a place in a hostile situation, I believe.
There are no real final answers here though, just a sad situation, particularly for the women of Afghanistan, and always more questions. But I am glad it is finally over. (Can we finally end the AUMF now? That'd be nice... the House passed it, but I don't know if its chances in the Senate are great. Here's hoping, however.)
This absolute legend has done the research. Those million dollar sales of Mario games that are absolutely and definitively NOT worth a million dollars? Yeah, that was open market manipulation. Don't trust WATA games. VGA seems better at it and don't have a motive to manipulate prices.
Anyway, the takeaway here is that there's no way us being smart about this is going to keep the general public from being fooled. If you're collecting old video games, take a break for a few years and wait for the bubble to burst. It's going to be ugly for a while.
Apparently this is how long the community name is. I understand and respect what each of those letters stand for, but frankly it's so long it's comical at this point. Can we all agree to find a way to shorten this just for the sake of regular conversation?
It's no longer relegated to their mobile offerings. Their DOTA clone Pokemon game is fully saturated with the worst excesses. You can win pants from a loot box! Denim pants! Like- like the kind you have in real life already (and were probably cheaper).
Nintendo... is officially part of the problem. Nintendo, who was already treading the kiddie pool of bad AAA business practices already, has now just gone off the deep end and plunged right in.
This is weird and I'm not sure of the timeline but I have no memories of Tendo City or Ramble City. Please bare with me, because I might be going senile but I remember a Blast City and Random City which seems to be an alternate Sega variant. According to my fuzzy memory it started for me when I was checking out virtuafighter.com and discovering the Blast City forums owned by Ice-9. That grew to be a wonderful place of general gaming forums. I was mostly a lurker, until Ice-9 decided to shut down those forums. Luckily for most of the users there was another set of forums setup by another member of the forums. I want to say that the guy who set up the new forums name was Jared(?) but my memories fail me. And that's where we gathered just talking about random things, honestly it was a awesome time and some of the best online gaming community experiences I've had were during those years. I've never really found another online community like it.
User names I think I can recall...
Jared(maybe?) who owned the forums
Anais Nin/Abstractica/Anafaery who was the main moderator
Imashroom
DCwhizz (was he a troll or not? I guess we'll never know)
Mustafa
AnimeJoe
Cyrus
Armory
Welltall
Qoxvii (spelling?)
Demona
Kitten or kitty something
Dirty Sanchez
I did continue to play games with some these players during and after the forums went down I'm sure. I played with Abstractica, Armory and Cyrus on the Dreamcast Quake III and PSO and they even helped me start in WoW afterwards. But social media wasn't really a thing and I was pretty gaurded as far as getting too close to anyone, which is my own fault. Regrettably I lost contact with them as one by one people moved on from the games we were playing for various reasons.
Do these names ring a bell? Am I in the right place? or did I stumble into a parallel universe? However, if these names jog any memories I would love to have updates of where the "children of the city" ended up. I know some left for Console City which seems defunct now as well.
How embararssing would it be if I just stumbled into coincidence and everyone here has no clue of what I'm talking about. Btw, this is the thread that brought me here. It's the only "hit" I've ever found that had names I recognized. https://www.tendocity.net/showthread.php...&pid=96693
It seems weird to say considering I only really knew people by their online usernames with only a few exceptions, but I hope everyone is doing well during these crazy times.
According to my fuzzy memory it started for me when I was checking out virtuafighter.com and discovering the Blast City forums owned by Ice-9. That grew to be a wonderful place of general gaming forums. I was mostly a lurker, until Ice-9 decided to shut down those forums. Luckily for most of the users there was another set of forums setup by another member of the forums. I want to say that the guy who set up the new forums name was Jared(?) but my memories fail me. And that's where we gathered just talking about random things, honestly it was a awesome time and some of the best online gaming community experiences I've had were during those years. I've never really found another online community like it.